Check out this view! One new roof down, and lots to go…between the Golden Gate bridge, and California Highway 101 (a short hop from the Pacific Coast Highway 1), we have a lot of space to cover. In the lower third of the image, you’ll see the Queen Anne-style Fallon Building (the blue one), which was built in 1894, and is one of the few buildings in this area that survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It’s now home to a new kind of blue that we hope will be an inspiration for local residents to follow a historic lead, and put a little PV on their own rooftop. Let’s check back on this picture a year from now to see how we’re doing on surging the sun in San Francisco…

For those of you near San Francisco, California, we hope you’re able to join us. For those of us that aren’t quite as close, here’s “All The News That’s Fit to Print,”…which interestingly enough is a saying that comes from the New York Times in 1896…just a couple years, and one coast away from our latest edition!

I digress…anyway, here’s the news: The San Francisco LGBT Community Center is pleased to invite the community to join staff, board and volunteers for a celebration that will focus on the greening of San Francisco, and highlight The Center’s exciting new solar energy system. This Saturday, January 27th, from 11-3PM the Center will open its doors to the community to showcase their system, and speak green… If you can’t join us, we’ll let you know how it went!

Story submitted by Glen Kizer

In the minds of many people who see California from the outside, especially young people who have never been there, California is about Hollywood, and perfect weather…Los Angeles and San Francisco…beaches and Santa Monica…Redwood and Joshua trees…

To an older “Baby Boomer” from Ohio, California is about vineyards and wine…tomatoes and lettuce, and a huge agricultural sector. A lot of our organic food comes from California. We’ve perhaps read about the “freeze” in California, and may be missing citrus in the coming months… And today, for many Americans, California is about renewable energy. While they do have a lot of cars and trucks on huge highways, they also lead the US on a number of environmental issues including solar energy. In fact, more than half of the solar electricity in the United States is in Northern California. There are more PV panels in the PG&E service territory which is in northern California than in the other states in the US combined. I bet most of you did not know that.

It must be great to live in a State in a beautiful state with mountains and deserts and beaches and some of the largest trees. California is so big and so progressive on so many issues that many people who live in the rest of the US look to California for leadership. It is, however, a huge responsibility for those principals and teachers in the education sector.

In one school, the Barry School in Yuba City, California, the community is in the middle of an agricultural paradise with some of the largest farms and most productive farmland on the planet. Sacramento is not too far so they are not without “big cities” to visit and even San Francisco is not too far, but their school is in the middle of farmland. They have cable television, cell phones, the internet, and most of the same amenities that people who live in larger cities have, but they have something many of us do not have. They are able to drive by some of the most productive and well managed farms in the country on their way to museums, professional sporting events, and their state capital. They are also a part of the PG&E Solar Schools Program.

It is not surprising then that they have a garden, a greenhouse, and even chickens. They are growing a few things even in the winter. Their kids learn how things grow and what makes them grow faster and how it is possible to produce food while taking care of the Earth. Indirectly they learn science and math, and they learn about chemicals and biology. While it may not be easy to maintain gardens or greenhouses at many urban schools, they have the land, the climate, and the interest among students to learn what it means to grow plants and food. Many of their families are connected to the agricultural community that is all around Yuba City, California.

But their school is in Northern California, and it is also in the middle of the solar energy heartland of the US, and they felt a responsibility to help their students learn how it is possible to generate, to produce, to literally grow electricity from solar panels. So last year, with a grant from the PG&E Solar Schools Program, their school got its first solar electricity or photovoltaic (PV) system. Their system is next to their greenhouse and garden. They wanted the students to connect the sunlight making the plants grow with the sunlight making electricity. They also liked the connection between healthy food and clean energy. And they see the PV panels and the data they are collecting about electricity generating from the solar panels as teaching tools for science and math and simple physics. The Principal, Tom Walters, and the teachers, wanted the kids to see that science could be fun and that science is not just words on a page…it is also sunlight hitting solar panels and making electricity flow out.

They also seem to want their kids to understand what solar panels are doing throughout northern California and why they are important and how they work. They really do not want to lose the opportunity to connect their classroom work with the world that sits right outside their school.

California is a wonderful state with movie stars and palm trees and beautiful beaches and Redwood trees. The Governor is one of the biggest movie stars in the history of cinema. They also live in one of the largest and most important stretches of farmland in the world. And finally they live in the third largest area for solar energy only trailing the countries of Japan and Germany. Northern California is in third place and ahead of every other country on Earth except those two and it’s moving up quickly. California is many things and the teachers at the Barry School seem to feel it is important for their students to understand all of what makes California such a wonderful and unique place. For their kids, solar energy has become an integral part of the school and most of them will make it an integral part of their adult lives which will make it part of the future of the United States. To anyone who worries about the state of education in the US today or the future of the country, take heart…the future looks like a bright and sunny day in Yuba City California where they are generating part of their electricity from a few solar panels on a pole…from “solar on a stick” that sits in the middle of the school’s garden just a few feet from their greenhouse.

I’ve heard that New Year’s resolutions date back to Roman times, and that one of the most important first resolutions was simply to return borrowed farm equipment…how far we’ve come… Some say that resolutions should be modest, and reachable…while others would reach for the seemingly unreachable goal… While I like to consider myself pragmatic, I am fond of dreaming…and as all of our paths have crossed, we have all shared our ideas and dreams…so here’s one of mine.

Balance is important in most any undertaking, and we must reach while also mobilizing that first step that takes us to the next. I challenge us all (including myself) to a collective goal. Let’s make 2007 the year we begin to surge the sun. Surge the sun you say? Impossible. There’s that little thing called fission, and the sun is after all a star.

Photo courtesy of NASA

Let’s make the sun our rock star. I consulted my friend Google on a few calculations, and Google found a link to a story across the country that I found interesting – Boston Globe Link Dr. Knowledge -

“The sun radiates uniformly in all directions, mainly visible light and infrared radiation, and we can calculate the total amount of energy radiated by measuring the quantity of solar energy/second reaching every square meter of Earth and then multiplying that by the total surface area of a sphere with radius equal to the radius of Earth orbit. We get the astonishingly huge amount of 400 trillion trillion watts. To put this into a crazy context, every second the sun produces the same energy as about a trillion 1 megaton bombs! In one second, our sun produces enough energy for almost 500,000 years of the current needs of our so-called civilization. If only we could collect it all and use it!”

For 2007, we heartily encourage everyone we know, and everyone you know to harness your very own piece of the sun. Let’s surge the sun. Who knows, the impossible may be more within reach than any of us know?

No action is too large or too small…we each have an energy seed to plant, and sow…let’s keep that farm equipment out in the field! Some of your schools will be getting your very first system in the coming months…we can learn about solar, and plot our eventual home system…we can operate solar powered units in our hands…we can use the sun to charge our batteries…we can add solar elements in the garden that pump our water or light our paths in the evening…it’s our collective action that will surge the sun…

Keep sharing your surging stories…we have some big plans for 2007 including some new and exciting partners…welcome back from your holiday break, and Happy 2007 to all.